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At New York's Brasserie Ruhlmann, we settled into a booth, for skate in beurre noir and lemon slivers. Two girls opposite in starched white shirts and red-velvet dresses wore frizzy-haired pigtails that erupted violently from the sides of their heads. The imps giggled -- at the expense of their tolerant father. I sipped my Riesling, and slipped, joyously and officially, into the holiday spirit.

And yet, and yet. At around five the next evening, I walked past a woman in her 60s, sitting stiff-backed and alone outside an East Side cafe. She had drunk an entire bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne by herself and was toying with her risotto. A black mink was around her shoulders, and she visibly swayed while trying to read the New Yorker in the feeble street light of the night.

Bookish respite from the holiday frenzy: Brothers, Nature Wars,and Independent People are thought-provoking works well worth cracking.

The holidays are often like this: genuine joy interlaced with moments of sadness. My survival strategy, when all the festivities and forced bonhomie get to be too much, is to retreat into a corner and read. Nothing restores me to myself better than a quiet moment with a good book, and so I pass on recommendations for three books that made me think a little deeper and a little better. They will make great gifts for others, or provide you, if you are of similar disposition, with the perfect shield against the high-pitched frenzy of the season.

Brothers by George Howe Colt. Any man in business with his brother -- whether happily entwined in entrepreneurial success or stewing opposite his nemesis at the family-office roundtable -- should read this superb book. Colt writes movingly and insightfully on how the fraternal relationship can so quickly move from loving idolatry to hands-around-the-throat. Competition among brothers can spur a man to great intellectual heights and worldly success -- and it can lead him equally into a paranoid hell.

Brothers recounts the symbiotic relationship of the "good" and "bad" Theo and Vincent van Gogh; the hypercompetitive Kellogg brothers fighting over their cereal kingdom; the haughty and constant demands that James Joyce made of his "draught horse" brother, Stannie. Colt's superb storytelling will stop you in your tracks, making you think hard about your own family dynamics while wondering generally about others'. Colt's take on "martyred siblings" and "enabler" brothers, for example, made me think of Peter and Bernie Madoff. This is one fine book, both wildly entertaining and utterly thought-provoking.

Nature Wars by Jim Sterba. Well worth the effort if you are engaged in conservation issues. Sterba starts his book on the borders of Maine's Acadia National Park. Seeing some grapevines choking off a ravine and stream, Sterba rips out the interloping vines so the original forest can take hold. But his research reveals that the vines were probably planted in the 19th century, when the entire area was bucolic farmland. John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought the land, which was turned over to Acadia in 1961, and a new forest devoured the pasture that existed before.

That is the thesis of this book: The major annihilation of nature in the U.S. occurred in the late 19th century, when everything from buffalo to hardwood forests was felled wholesale. The conservationist efforts of the past 100 years have been so successful that wildlife such as coyotes, turkies, bears, and deer -- not long ago a sight so rare that Americans stopped their cars to get a look -- have become plentiful pests. At times this book reads like a well-reported tabloid exaggeration, but it will surely make you look differently at the "narrative of loss" at the heart of our environmental news coverage.

Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Iceland's Laxness won the 1955 Nobel Prize in literature, largely on the basis of this book about the farmer Bjartur of the Summerhouses. It is, to my mind, one of the most undervalued literary masterpieces of the 20th century. The books starts with a blood-drinking murderous witch making an unholy alliance; don't be put off by the trippy writing. After the witch is dismembered, the book moves from ancient times to the 1920s, and, from then on, more conventional prose tells the story of Bjartur, an indentured farmhand who saves up enough money to free himself. He buys a small homestead, Summerhouses, and heads to the hills to finally become his own master.

Summerhouses is in the pass once ruled by the witch, and visitors to the area habitually place a rock on the cairn as a peace offering. Not proud Bjartur, who scorns this ancient practice.

And so unfolds the tale of a cursed family. This book is about independence and fealty; how the unresolved shadows of a family are passed from one generation to the next. It's bleak, but bleak like Shakespeare. You will be transported, lifted to the heavens.